VMworld 2016 – Day 1 – General Session

The day started with the General Session where the pre-show artist was #awesome.

This was followed by Jean-Pierre Bruard SVP & GM EMEA (@vmwarebrulard) with the obligatory thank you to all attendees and sponsors and also introduced the vminclusion initiative.

We were then asked to think about What is Tomorrow? with a though provoking monologue which ultimately showed that “we the people” are tomorrow/the future.

Pat Gelsinger (@PGelsinger) (minus his recent iconic boot) was then introduced and he delivered his usual high quality show, talking about the power of Digital Transformation and what it means to business. He shared that only 20% of businesses are leading in Digital Transformation. What’s the difference between the Leaders and Leggards? According to VMware, it is Culture and Technology, Those still stuck in the past of the world of traditional IT are lagging behind the curve.

He then took us from the past, through to the present and into the future of how business consume IT Globally.

And according to his analysts, in 2030 there will be 596m workloads with 52% in the Public cloud, 29% in the Private cloud, and only 19% still based on Traditional IT!

Device Proliferation is a constant, and with the IoT, it’s clear IT is expanding exponentially, year on year. But with this so is the age old battle between control and freedom. End Users want freedom, IT want control. In a hybrid world it is about given both freedom and Control.

Pat Gelsinger then introduced, at a high level, the new features, vSphere 6.5 and VSAN 6.5 and also discussed VMware Cloud on AWS. Finally, he introduced Guido Appenzeller who talked about VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture.

Finally, Pat Gelsinger brought it all back together focusing again on VMware’s One Cloud vision.